At their core is the belief, the faith really, in students’ ability to do better. There is something to be said about a teacher who is demanding and tough not because he thinks students will never learn but because he is so absolutely certain that they will.

In the September 19, 2011 education issue of The New York Times Magazine, I was pleasantly surprised to read several articles that identified seemingly counterintuitive ideas about how to prepare students for success. “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” by Paul Toughy, was about two educators, one independent school head and one charter school leader, who had identified failure as an important ingredient in defining a student’s character. Another story, called “My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling,” by Clifford Levy describes his family’s experience when, as a foreign correspondent in Russia, he and his spouse decided to place their three young children in a local school, where they didn’t know the language and inevitably had to sink or swim. In both articles, a strong theme came through: that in order to bring out the full potential of our children, we must teach them resilience.